All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Navigation

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to
use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

Please Log In to Continue

is_prereq is not worthless. While what you say is obviously true (some good modules may not be used by any other), the reverse does not necessarily apply: if a module is being used by other modules, written by different authors, then that's a sign that there are other people who respect it, and therefore it's got a chance of being of higher quality than other, similar modules that have no such dependencies.

If I'm trying to pick between several app-oriented modules then none of them will have is_prereq, so it's a level playing field, and the existence of is_prereq isn't doing any harm.

Or, rather, the only harm it's doing is to people who treat kwalitee numbers like they mean something in absolute terms. And such people deserve what they get (a high XP score on PerlMonks, probably).

if a module is being used by other modules, written by different authors, then that's a sign that there are other people who respect it, and therefore it's got a chance of being of higher quality than other, similar modules that have no such dependencies.

Ah, but you say "quality". kwalitee != quality.

If I chose to add a module as dependency, do I care whether this module has a README? Or whether it has POD coverage tests? Or uses strict everywhere? No, no and no. I include it because it turned out to be

if a module is being used by other modules, written by different authors, then that's a sign that there are other people who respect it, and therefore it's got a chance of being of higher quality than other, similar modules that have no such dependencies.

Ah, but you say "quality". kwalitee != quality.

Actually I said "a chance of... quality", the point being that it doesn't necessarily mean that the module is of higher quality, but in general there's likely to be a correlation between quality of mo